You didn't need this job. You were a judge on a prestigious federal appeals court.
The President asked you to take over a gigantic department seen by many experts
as an unwieldy behemoth designed to thwart the best efforts of even the most
gifted manager. Why did you take it?

Principally
because of my experiences on 9/11. I was the head of the [Department
of Justice's] Criminal Division. I was very much involved in our response,
including the strategy that we used to disrupt other attacks. And I guess, coming
out of that crucible, I had a sense that, as someone who has spent most of my
life in public service, there was probably not going to be a more important
task for my generation than dealing with the issue of the war against terror.
So, given the opportunity to make a contribution and with the understanding
that the President thought I could make a contribution, [this] is probably one
of the few jobs that I would have left the bench for.

Are you glad you took the job?
Is it fun?

"Fun" is not the right word. I
mean, in some ways it is enormously gratifying. I work with some tremendous
people, and I think we've actually accomplished a lot in the last year in
reconfiguring the department. But there are times when it's frustrating, and
it's difficult for anybody, I think, to be happy when you get criticism that's
unfair. Sometimes it's just difficult to move a large organization quickly. I'd
like to see things get done yesterday that sometimes take weeks and even months
because the process has a lot of stakeholders and legal requirements, and it
just takes time.

Although
federal appeals court judges do have prestige, they tend to be buried in very
quiet, very technical work [and] locked up with their law clerks. I think Mario
Cuomo compared it to being in a tomb. (He was talking about the Supreme Court.)
With the war on, was that too far from the action?

I
think part of it was that. With the war on, and having been in the war, so to
speak, for two years as head of the Criminal Division, I did feel a little bit
as if I had retired from the field of battle at a point [when] the battle was
still raging. And I hadn't been a judge for that long. But coming back to the
fray in something that I deeply believe in, which is the need to build a
response to terrorism that we can live with over the long haul—not
something that's very aggressive [. . .] to a level that can't be sustained,
but one that we can really sustain over the next five, ten years—[I
really couldn't say no] to the invitation to come and participate in building
that system.

Nobody
doubts your intelligence, your dedication, [or] your legal skills. But what
qualifies you to run a brand new department consolidating 22 sub-agencies with
184,000 employees? Is there anything that you've learned the hard way that you
wish you had known from the start?

Yeah.
I think that, when I took the job, what I had in mind was my experience when I
was at the Department of Justice, having to bring a lot of different teams
together—whether it was the FBI or the IRS, state and local law
enforcement—to build a case or to build an investigation and drive it
through the conclusion. And I felt that the key to success in the job I did as
a prosecutor was bringing a lot of groups together and forcing them to identify
their mission and driving them to accomplish the mission. The one thing about
being a prosecutor is that it's a very unforgiving job. You know when you've
won and you know when you've lost. And so you have a very clear sense of the
fact that success in the end is the only real measure that counts.

So
that was the philosophy I think I brought into that role [and] into this job.
And although the scale here is much greater, in some ways the challenge is the
same. You've got a lot of different components, and you've got to transform
them from agencies that are focused on doing their own jobs to a team of
agencies that are focused on an overall mission. And I do think the experience
I had making cases and making tough cases and working with a lot of different
agencies has been a real help in this job.

You inherited many politically
appointed senior managers with little expertise for their jobs. The famous
"Brownie," Michael Brown at FEMA, is everybody's favorite example. Why didn't
you say, "Mr. President, I'd be honored to take this position, but only if I
can hire and fire my own senior staff"?

The people I've hired have all
been people I selected and wanted. I guess legend has it that I've been saddled
with people I didn't want. Now, obviously I inherited people, and it took a
little bit of time to achieve a turnover. Some people I would have liked to
keep, some people I frankly wasn't sorry to see go. One of the challenges for
me coming in, though, was not to completely vacate the place and then have to
go through what is a very time-consuming process to repopulate. And that's why,
maybe in a couple of cases, there were people who stayed on who had a confusion
of loyalties.

Do you want to elaborate on
that?

Well, I mean, in Mike Brown's
testimony [to a Senate committee in February], he basically acknowledged that
he was deliberately insubordinate. Obviously, had he been candid with me at the
time that he just wasn't capable of functioning under my leadership, I would
have said, "Mike, I respect that and understand it, and have a nice life." I clearly have a regret that that wasn't clear to
me at the time. But I will say that most of the people that I inherited and
stayed on did, I think, work hard and had no problem transferring their
loyalties to new leadership. Because in the end what this is about is not me,
or individuals at the top of the organization. It's about the obligation we owe
to the American people and to the President.

Let me make sure I've got what
you mean by "deliberately insubordinate." I think he testified that he
basically went around you and didn't keep you informed because he'd rather just
deal straight with the White House, and he thought he could get more done that
way.

Well, I think he got less done,
because the White House is not, and should not be, an operational organization
that is going to order the Coast Guard helicopters to move from Point A to
Point B. If Michael Brown felt he needed something, and that he couldn't do it
on his own, and frankly I delegated to him virtually all the authority that I
had.

You've taken some grief for
that, haven't you?

Well, I have to say, in
retrospect, knowing what I know now, I wish I hadn't done that. The one thing I
will say is this: I replaced him quickly. By the end of that first week, I had
put [Coast Guard Vice] Admiral [Thad] Allen in place to run the operation in
New Orleans. Now, had I known at the time what I later learned was in his mind,
I would have put Admiral Allen in a week earlier. I can't replay that event, although
I can wish I had known what was in his mind at the time rather than when he
testified six months later. All I can say is that I was at least pleased that I
was able to correct the problem as quickly as I did.

Other
than what we just discussed, any mistakes or regrets since you took this job?

There's
always a frustration in the time that it takes to get things done. It's just
the nature of dealing with things like how long it takes to procure things through
the government procurement regulations, or what the various rules and
regulations are that govern our ability to promote new standards when we want
to put standards out to elevate security. I sometimes find myself wishing that
we could accomplish in two or three weeks what it seems to take us two or three
or six months to accomplish. But I have to say [that] I knew coming into
government that you are dealing with a thicket of procedures and policies that
are mandated by law and that, as impatient as I am to get through the job of
elevating all the different aspects of security, I can't do it in a way that's
going to lay us open to legal challenge, for example, or violate some legal
principle.

What are your proudest
accomplishments at this stage of the job?

The thing that I thought was
most important, and I hope I have achieved to some extent, is an honest and
straightforward conversation with the American people that says there's always
going to be risk and that, if we really wanted to eliminate risks, we would
have to [create] a society so autocratic and encumbered by security that we
would have neither our liberty nor our prosperity.

We've got to find a place in the
world of homeland security that does allow us to have a free society and does
allow us to have prosperity and doesn't just smother us with security. But that
means that we have to be honest about the fact that we will be accepting some
level of risk if we do that. The extent to which we've incorporated that
philosophy into Homeland Security is the thing I'm proudest of.

What
ever happened to all those "yellow alerts" and "orange
alerts" that used to stir people up when Tom Ridge was DHS Secretary? Did
you decide those were silly and just say "stop it"?

We
did one. We did "orange" when the British had their attacks on July
7th, and I tried to be really clear [and really focused] about why we did. My
view has been that, as we get better intelligence, as we are more confident in
our own knowledge about what's going on in our country as well as outside our
country, we ought to try to be as precise as possible about how we react to
threats. I'm not saying that there aren't occasions when raising the threat
level makes sense, either for a particular area or a particular sector or even
generally. What I'm saying is that, as we are more targeted in terms of what we
are able to detect about a plot or a threat, we don't need to necessarily take
a broad-based approach to raising everything across the board. We can be really
focused in terms of responding in a very specific way to what the threat is.
And that means we don't need to necessarily trigger the whole mechanism of
raising alerts.

President
Bush initially opposed creating your department. Then he embraced it for what
many say were political reasons. Be that as it may, was DHS a good idea?

DHS
was a good idea. I was agnostic on it because I wasn't involved in the process
of setting it up. But the idea that one ought to unify and synchronize all of
those elements of government that relate to security, particularly with respect
to terrorism security, and that [one] ought to be able to build a systematic
approach to prevention, protection, and response and recovery—I think
that makes sense.

And I
think that we have actually succeeded in the last year in bringing a lot more
unity to these functions and [in] being able to look at a problem not just in
terms of "here's a single stove pipe of an agency that has a particular
capability and is going to use that capability," but rather beginning by
asking the question, "what do we want to accomplish?" Instead of making
policy by saying "here's the tool that I have, now how do I use the tool?"
we're now in the position to ask the question "what do we want to achieve?"
and then "what are the tools we ought to bring to the fight so we can
achieve it?" And I don't think you could have done that without this Department.
Even though, with the stand-up of the Defense Department in '47, nobody should
have been under any illusion that the job of building an integrated department
would be done in a year or two years or even three years.

When
I ask ordinary people, say my wife, what images come to mind when I say
"Michael Chertoff" or "DHS," a lot of them mention two
things: the botched response to Hurricane Katrina and the fiasco over
entrusting some of our biggest seaports to an outfit called Dubai Ports World,
an Arab-owned company. Is that a bum rap?

I
want to take the second as an example. Dubai Ports was never going to be
entrusted with the seaports. They were going to buy a company that basically
owns and operates the cranes that lift the containers out of the cargo holes
and puts them on the dock until they can be moved off by trucks. The impact and
the danger to security was negligible and, as a condition of agreeing on the
deal, we had actually put into place agreements that would have given us much
greater security and much greater control of the security overseas than we
would have had without the acquisition.

So
the furor about Dubai Ports to me is a case where the politics and the public
appearance overwhelmed what actually was a perfectly rational and sensible decision.
And I think in a nutshell that sums up the challenge of homeland security. To
do this job right, we're often required just to make a lot of decisions that
are a little complicated. [The decisions] require a fair amount of factual
investigation and sometimes they require us to balance a lot of different
considerations. It's been really hard sometimes to sum that up in a sound byte.
And it's easy to take something like Dubai Ports and say, "Arabs, ports,
bad." I think that it was unfortunate—not only in the individual
case, because I think it led to a result that was probably unfair to the
company—but [also because] I have since heard from our allies overseas, "What
are we going to make of America now? Does that mean that if we help Americans
but we're foreigners, Americans are going to retaliate against us?" And one of
the things I said at the time and I believe to be true is [that] it would be a
shame if the message we sent to the world was, "We don't understand who our
friends are and we're going to punish our friends." To me, one of the huge
issues we face in homeland security is how do we boil down and explain
decisions that are sometimes complicated and even difficult in a way that is
immediately intelligible in a world of blogs and instant messages and slogans.

There's a lot of talk in
Washington, some by people who admire you personally and have for
a long time, that DHS—the Department of
Homeland Security—is an organizational disaster, and that no one alive
could make it successful. How would you respond?

I think you probably could have
said those things about the Department of Defense back in the 1950s. I mean, if
you look at the history of the Department of Defense, they spent about thirty
years, before Goldwater-Nichols [a 1986 law reorganizing the military services
and clarifying the chain of command], with the services fighting among each
other, and every service trying to duplicate the effort of every other service.
If memory serves me, it was the Iran hostage effort—the failed Iran
hostage-rescue effort [of 1980]—that ultimately catalyzed the final
reconfiguration of the DOD to make it into what I think most people would
acknowledge is a well-functioning organization.

I have to say something else. It is often the case that the
perceived solution to every problem is "reorganize." Whether or not people think it was correct to create DHS in
the first place, we have it. The absolute worst outcome would be to pull it
apart and say, "Now let's reconfigure it again, either as several new
organizations or as parts of preexisting organizations." At some point, this
constant reorganizational churn distracts us from what is really necessary,
which is the hard, not particularly glamorous work of figuring out what you
need to do in the various categories of our responsibility—figuring out
what are the systems and the operations that will give us the result and then
implementing them. Implementation is what needs to be done, and that's the hard
and sometimes not very visible work that we're doing every day.

Let me push you on that
a little bit. Let's take the
Michael Brown situation. Before, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, reported directly to the president. When the head of
FEMA needed authority to do something, he'd go straight to the White House. Now,
because we have this new structure, he needs to come
to you—or at least he should—and then you need to go to the White
House, and sometimes you might need to get the Pentagon to give you resources. There are just more layers. Personalities aside,
doesn't all that layering inhibit your ability to get the best people to run an
agency like FEMA if they're not going to be reporting to the president, but to
somebody under the president?

First
of all, even in the old days, FEMA had to go to DoD. The director of FEMA never
had the authority to order DoD to do anything. That is a completely delusional
idea.

You're
right. I withdraw the delusional [part of the] question.

FEMA
always had to go to other agencies to do things. If FEMA were not part of DHS,
instead of the ability that we have to simply say to the Coast Guard, "Go
do it," FEMA would have had to come to us and [. . .] ask for a mission
assignment for the Coast Guard to do something.

The
proof of the pudding is actually what happened in Katrina. By his own
admission, what Mike Brown did was report directly to the White House, and
during the week that he did that, my sense is that we had less than optimal
performance. When I brought Admiral Allen in, Admiral Allen raised the level of
performance, but he had no difficulty operating within the structure of DHS.
The reality is that my order to Mike Brown and my message to Mike Brown was,
"You have all the authority to do whatever you need to do. Just make a
decision. Do it. If you need help, if there's something you can't get done,
come to me." So there was no bureaucratic impediment to his getting the
job done, and the pieces that didn't work well, when I look back, come from the
fact that there was planning about things like an evacuation of New Orleans
that had not been done not in the two days before the evacuation, which is much
too late, but in the weeks and months and years earlier.